Great Battles of the Great War

GREAT BATTLES OF THE GREAT WAR

Other books by Michael Stedman

Salford Pals: Pals Series

Manchester Pals: Pals Series

Thiepval: Battleground Europe Series

La Boisselle: Battleground Europe Series

Fricourt-Mametz: Battleground Europe Series

Guillemont: Battleground Europe Series

MICHAEL STEDMAN

ED SKELDING

GREAT

BATTLES

of the

GREAT WAR

Accompanies the major ITV series

Leo Cooper

First published in 1999,

reprinted 2000,

by

LEO COOPER

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

© Michael Stedman and Ed Skelding

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

in any form or by any means, without permission from the publishers.

ISBN 0 85052 702 3

Printed in Great Britain by The Bath Press

INTRODUCTION

The Writer’s perspective

Afriend recently reminded me that people who make no study of history are doomed to repeat it. That phrase encapsulates one of the great conundrums of history. All too often we echo its bleakest passages with willing replication.

The Balkans, more than any other place in the last one thousand years, have come to illustrate that quandary of repetion better than most. The first, 11th century, European Crusaders passed this way en route to their appointment with mayhem in the Holy Land The slaughter of Muslim innocents by Christian pilgrims and soldiers who survived that first terrible journey to the prize of Jerusalem has set the subsequent schedule of the Balkans in this meeting place of religious intolerance. This inhospitable corner of south-eastern Europe maintains many deeply ingrained sentiments, many of which are consequential upon the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s control of parts of the Balkans, Asia and North Africa between the late 13th and early 20th centuries. These predilections still drive many agendas here to this day. It is therefore quite respectable to argue that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s confrontation with ethnic intolerance in Kosovo, here in the epicentre of the Balkans, has its roots in almost a thousand years of religious tension.

Yet we all know that there is nothing romantic about war. There wasn’t in the 11th century and there isn’t today.

There is no point in ascribing gentle interpretation to the history of war. As one character within, a remarkable novel which describes the soldiers’, experience of the Great War said, ‘There’s too much f…in’ artillery in this bloody war…You don’t get no sleep.’¹ Such grumbling, stoical humour was the hallmark of the British Tommy, and he was all the better for it. But at the less humorous end of the Great War’s documentation let me mention the minutes of a military conference held during the middle period of the Battle for Passchendaele. Within the ghastly and inhuman prevailing conditions the soldiers were encouraged forward, during assaults, behind a protective barrage of shells. The indescribable ferocity of that curtain of hellish detonations can only be imagined. Yet as the conference revealed – ‘The only means of knowing whether troops are sufficiently close to the barrage is when casualties are inflicted by our own artillery’²

This wasn’t an accidental occurrence of that meaningless late 20th century phrase ‘friendly fire’. It was the certainty of casualties ‘inflicted by our own artillery’. That indeed was a very hard lesson to learn.

A glance through the imagery which dominates these pages will help you understand the purpose of this book. It is not a guide-book or travelogue. Nor is it a source of detail in the form of a reference work. What I hope this text and the illustrations provide is a fresh and evocative look at the imagery of the Great War. Clearly it would be foolish to suggest that by reading and viewing the following pages you will have understood the enormous complexity of the Great War. After thirty years of interest and study I would never claim to have fully comprehended all it has to offer. I simply know a little about a small fragment of what happened. However, what I do know for certain is that those four years which ground a grotesque path through the early years of the 20th Century’s history have marked and defined some of the worst fears of man. They were one of the lowest points in a century repeatedly characterised by the pointless slaughter of thousands, sometimes millions, of humans. In response to the ugly brutality of the First World War historians and commentators have generated an enormous body of analytic and descriptive literature. This book is not intended to add to that imponderable quantity of words.

Just one history lesson!

The catalyst of the Great War was death in Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914. The Balkan states, Greece, Albania, Serbia and others, were then, as now, the focus of both western and Russian concern as the gradual collapse of Turkish control left opportunities for Balkan states to argue amongst themselves. Since the late 13th century Turkey had maintained the vast Ottoman Empire by rule from Constantinople, although by 1914 they were not masters of that disparate and far-flung collection of peoples. Two years earlier, in 1912, the Balkan League, comprising Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece, had declared war on Turkey, effectively ending Turkish influence in the area. The following year, 1913, the Balkan pot had overheated again as Serbia and Bulgaria bickered over the territories lost by the Ottoman Empire’s crumbling. Serbia’s victory and the sentiment of her strong ethnic links with Russia meant that she became a threat to the stability of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

There had already been one Bosnian crisis, during 1909, when Russia had failed Serbia and allowed the annexation of this region by the Austro-Hungarians. When the heir to the throne of that empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Gavrilo Princep, a Serbian nationalist, in Sarajevo on 28 June, that single event unleashed the forces of the Great War. An ultimatum was issued to Serbia but its terms were deemed unacceptable. However, Germany’s alliance with Austro-Hungary enabled the former to be persuaded of the need to provide support. The Austro-Hungarians were encouraged and declared war on the Serbians. Russia responded in kind with a declaration of war upon Austria-Hungary. This brought forth the involvement of France, Russia’s ally, and Germany. Britain, though not bound by the terms of any alliance, was soon brought into the conflict when German troops invaded Belgium as part of their plan to defeat the French. Britain, as a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, was incorporated.

The Great War was fact. It was 11.00 pm on 4 August 1914.

Eighty-five years later it seems incredible that, as the 20th century flows into a new millennium, Turkey, Serbia and the explosive ethnic and religious contrasts which mark this part of the world astride the Bosphorus, scene of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, are still the focus of our fears.

Within the terrible journey through the slough of despondency which the four years of the Great War became there were many significant battles in what became a global conflict. John Bourne has pointed up the statistics lucidly:

‘There are some who dispute the status of the Great War as a ‘true’ World War. This is perverse. The conflict was global. Major wars were fought not only in western, eastern and southern Europe, but also in the Middle East and the Caucasus. A lesser – guerrilla – war tied down more than 100,000 British Empire troops in East Africa. Surface fleets and submarines contested naval supremacy on and under the oceans of the world. But this was far from all. The insatiable demands of war extended far beyond the battlefields, not least because two of the major belligerents, Great Britain and France, were imperial powers with access to global resources of manpower, raw materials and food. The ‘British’ Army eventually recruited 1.6 million Indians, 630,000 Canadians, 412,000 Australians, 136,000 South Africans, 130,000 New Zealanders and approximately 50,000 Africans, as well as several hundred thousand Chinese ‘coolies’. The ‘French’ Army recruited 600,000 North and West Africans as combat troops and a further 200,000 as labourers. The ability of the Entente to command the manpower/and natural resources of Africa, Asia, Australasia and North and South America made a major contribution to victory. The political and economic impact of this global mobilisation was also immense.’³

The consequences were vast and far-reaching for all the corners of the globe. By the war’s end Russia had been plunged into the Bolshevik revolution as a direct consequence of the conflict’s impact upon her society The United j States of America had been drawn into the European mêlée by Germany’s ill-advised use of unrestricted submarine warfare. The British Empire way fatally wounded. European monarchies were swept away Boundaries too numerous to contemplate were about to be changed with far-reaching consequences for nations, ethnic groupings and future generations.

So why choose these three battles?

The answer is a simple one. Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele were all launched as offensive battles by the British armed forces in the anticipation of affecting both the course and outcome of the war. Their progenitors and planners had great expectations. The outcome of each battle was, however, in each case unexpected. All three added significantly to the growing catalogue of misery which the Great War spawned. All three generated enduring imagery whose hold on our society’s collective memory is still powerful: debilitating hardship, disease and the omnipresent flies which settled eagerly upon every meagre mouthful of food in the heat of Gallipoli, stoical lines of disciplined volunteers marching forward, their rifles shouldered; part of every sad reflection on the futility of the Somme campaign’s tragic opening. The hideous circumstances of soldiers sucked into the mud’s enveloping foulness on the slopes beneath Passchendaele village. It is not surprising that all three have come to be regarded, in popular interpretation, as British failures. That interpretation is, however, not a correct one.

The images within this book can only be a stepping stone. Across the flood of detailed words which is still written about the Great War the following pages denote a series of places which should be burnished into our collective memory. The tranquillity and languid peace which marks their atmosphere today is in utter contrast to the loathsome reality which once unfolded there.

Viewing Ed Skelding’s remarkable documentary history of these three great struggles is both a harrowing and uplifting experience. The programmes are compelling because of the unique juxtaposition of bleak contemporary footage with the captivating colour and textures which abound in those same locations today. To stand and witness the rows upon desolate rows of graves shimmering in the heat of the Turkish sun, to see the bright faces of volunteer soldiers riding the flood of expectant optimism before the Somme nightmare unfolded, to see the footage of battle-weary soldiers dragging the very vestiges of their last energy across the sodden battlefields of Flanders is to understand. Look carefully at each programme as its images move across your television’s screen. This was the first war where reality was captured on film, where photographers and artists looked into the eyes of men at war and saw the terror that we all pray we never have to meet with.

My intent:

‘Less is best’ is the maxim by which this volume has been created.

The book is intended, unashamedly, to be atmospheric. My intention is to reveal something of the legacy which these great battles have left in situ. There is a sense of history, something which I call the cathedral experience, when you stand within such battlefields. I have seen adults and children alike weep at the understanding of Thiepval’s stark truth. The very utterance of Passchendaele’s strangely haunting name is enough to stop any correctly prepared school group in its track. To look across the solidly agrarian scene towards Tyne Cot cemetery’s vivid architecture, which rises shockingly within the surrounding calm, is to understand at once the cost of war. By contrast with the human forfeit endured within the 1917 battles for Passchendaele the campaigning on Gallipoli in 1915 produced a light harvest for the grim reaper. Yet Gallipoli’s harsh circumstance were, in so many ways, the birthplace of Australian self-consciousness – born of the hideous circumstances of her wounded and maimed soldiers’ evacuation from those evil hillsides. It would be inappropriate to describe Gallipoli as anything other than a ‘Great Battle of the Great War’, even though its battle casualties, spread over eight months, amounted to a total rather less than those experienced elsewhere during the grim years of 1916 and 1917.

These three Great Battles have been the subject of millions of words. Some accounts are academic and arid; others are inspiringly readable. Thousands of small works were published immediately after the war, describing a unit’s contribution to the war effort, sometimes official, sometimes a casual and comradely testimony of shared hardships, anguish and loss. Latterly many histories have drawn, quite rightly, upon the fund of personal reminiscences which were recorded in great number towards the end of the participants’ long lives⁴. Yet the text you will find on the subsequent pages can be read within an evening. Each chapter is formed from a brief explanation of why the battle was significant and how it came to be undertaken. Therefore, this book is not intended to be read as a definitive or chronological history. Its purpose is to provide a focal point of empathy. Not a reference work, but something to remind your heart why we need to know and why we shouldn’t forget.

Opposite each of Ed Skelding’s powerful images you will find my running commentary or explanation, as well as a caption explaining a little of the photograph’s background and context. Many of Ed’s photographs, taken with such care during the last three years, have an ethereal quality. The space and depth within each provide the chance to ponder how evil could have left such a mesmerically attractive legacy. Within the commentary and explanation I have made use of a number of sources and devices:

♦ Illustrative extracts from Official History sources⁵.

♦ Extracts from other contemporary printed materials⁶ including personal accounts and diary extracts.

♦ Brief extracts from military unit records such as Divisional, Brigade or Battalion diaries.

♦ A map of the action or a map of the area/theatre of war.

♦ A contemporary image or photograph of the participants and locations.

These might be atmospheric images of soldiers and personalities or the terrible consequences of war, its unthinking death and destruction.

The extraordinary thing about the Great War is that its many layers can be peeled back as if by an archaeologist. Each layer is met by doubt that so many were involved, that so much was lost. Each look deeper into the history and its fascinating wealth of anecdote, detail, tragedy, inspiration and humanity is almost invariably accompanied by a period of reflection and self-appraisal, sometimes simply by a sense of sadness or even tears.

Your discovery of a little fragment of history, perhaps a walk where your antecedents fought, maybe a single charge case from a spent round plucked from the battlefield, a photograph in a rusty box in the attic, all invariably lead to a desire to find out more.

It is my hope that you will be able to return in person to each and all of these places. In their own ways every one will both haunt and reward your journeying to meet with their peculiar and transfixing ambience. It is as if by being there, in places which have been traumatised and raped by the very worst which the 20th century has done, that we as individuals can be renewed. These places provide opportunities to learn of our frailty, of our own strengths and the reasons why we should deploy that strength with caution, concern and liberality. When utilised by skilled teachers, the Somme is one of the greatest classrooms, a learning experience without equal. There I have seen some of the finest lessons driven home to enraptured students by teachers whose skill is enhanced and honed by being within this incredible environment. And those lessons have nothing to do with the promotion of nationalism or looking insensitively backwards in the belief that the men who fought the war were in some way a ‘lost and finer generation’. These places are full of the most important messages and lessons for young people today. They should be visited and learned from. We are all the better for doing so.

If you haven’t yet been, to some or all of these places, I can only counsel that you should. If you have, and are familiar with the places pictured within this book, I can only hope that its imagery is both evocative and meaningful.

Michael Stedman, Leigh, Worcestershire. May 1999.

The Photographer’s Perspective

Of all the twentieth century’s grim wars, the First World War stands out as a particularly tragic event. Many hundreds of thousands of men marched off to their deaths in a series of desperate battles that would ultimately become known as the Great War. It was great in terms of the number of nations involved, in the number of places across the world where the battles took place, but most of all it is remembered for the great number who were killed.

More than ten million people died, most of them on battlefields whose names became part of everyday conversation during the war years of 1914 to 1918: places like Mons and Loos and Vimy Ridge. But there were three that emerged as the most dreaded: Gallipoli, the Somme and Passchendaele. All three had particularly tragic twists that added both to their evil reputations and to the death tolls, giving them a special place in the public memory.

In recent years interest in the Great War has risen steadily, growing beyond that of the military enthusiast or of the groups and institutions dedicated to preserving its memory.